Conan O'Brien

• 1. Introduction

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  Conan Christopher O'Brien was born on the 18th of April 1963, in Brookline, Massachusetts, into a family defined by high achievers. His father was a physician and professor at Harvard Medical School. His mother was a partner at the Boston law firm Ropes and Gray. He went on to win a national writing contest in high school, graduate magna cum laude from Harvard, and write some of the most beloved episodes of The Simpsons. Then, in 1993, he landed a job hosting a late-night television show that almost every critic said he would fail at.

  What followed was nearly thirty years of television that confused, delighted, and outlasted almost everyone around him. How does a Harvard-educated comedy writer with no television hosting experience become one of the longest-serving late-night hosts in American history? And what happens when the dream job he waited sixteen years for is snatched away after just seven months?

• 2. A Writer First

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  Before any of the television cameras, there was a typewriter and a high school newspaper. O'Brien served as managing editor of The Sagamore at Brookline High School. He won the National Council of Teachers of English writing contest with a short story called "To Bury the Living". He graduated as valedictorian in 1981.

  At Harvard, he majored in history and literature and wrote his senior thesis on what he called "literary progeria" in the works of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, examining how those authors used children as symbols. He also played drums in a band called the Bad Clams. His future NBC boss, Jeff Zucker, was at Harvard at the same time, running the student newspaper The Harvard Crimson while O'Brien was serving as president of The Harvard Lampoon.

  After graduating magna cum laude in 1985, O'Brien moved to Los Angeles and joined the writing staff of the HBO sketch comedy series Not Necessarily the News. He took improvisation classes at The Groundlings and worked briefly on The Wilton North Report before Lorne Michaels hired him at Saturday Night Live in January 1988. During his three years there, O'Brien wrote recurring sketches including "Mr. Short-Term Memory" and "The Girl Watchers", the latter first performed by Tom Hanks and Jon Lovitz. In 1989, O'Brien and his fellow SNL writers received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series. He also co-wrote a television pilot called Lookwell, starring Adam West, with NBC support from president Brandon Tartikoff. The pilot never went to series, though it became a cult hit years later.

• 3. Two Seasons on Springfield

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  Mike Reiss and Al Jean, then running The Simpsons, called O'Brien directly with a job offer in 1991. The show was already prestigious enough that, as O'Brien later recalled, "everyone wanted to be on that show, but they never hired." He was among the first writers brought in after the original crew.

  An old Groundlings friend, actress Lisa Kudrow, helped O'Brien find an apartment in Beverly Hills. The two also became romantically involved. Kudrow believed he should be performing rather than writing, but O'Brien disagreed, convinced she was simply flattering him.

  Once inside the writers' room, O'Brien wasted little time making an impression. Writer Josh Weinstein described the atmosphere as "a ten-hour Conan show, nonstop". He had a bit he performed for the room, which Wallace Wolodarsky described as "the Nervous Writer" - involving O'Brien opening a can of Diet Coke and nervously pitching a joke while spraying himself with it. According to John Ortved, at least one fellow writer believed O'Brien had been a strong candidate to become showrunner.

  O'Brien wrote "Marge vs. the Monorail" and "Homer Goes to College", two of the series' most acclaimed episodes, as well as "New Kid on the Block" and the wraparounds for "Treehouse of Horror IV". Writers and observers noted that the show shifted in a more surreal direction after O'Brien arrived. He was also working on the side with Robert Smigel on a musical film based on the SNL "Hans and Franz" sketch, a project that was never produced.

  It was while heading to the voice recording session for "Homer Goes to College" that O'Brien received the phone call that would change everything. His agent Gavin Polone called to say he had been selected as the new host of NBC's Late Night, a decision announced on the 26th of April 1993. Postproduction supervisor J. Michael Mendel found O'Brien face-down on the carpet. "He was just quiet and comatose down there on that carpet," Mendel recalled. "I remember looking at him and saying, 'Wow. Your life is about to change, in a really dramatic way.'" NBC and O'Brien eventually split the cost of buying him out of his Fox contract.

• 4. Nearly Canceled, Then Beloved

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  Late Night with Conan O'Brien premiered on the 13th of September 1993, from Studio 6A at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, and the reviews were brutal. Tom Shales of The Washington Post suggested O'Brien should "resume his previous identity, Conan O'Blivion." Critics called him nervous, fidgety, too East Coast, too sophisticated, too young, and too tall. O'Brien himself wrote a self-deprecating piece for The New York Times on the day of the premiere, titled "O'Brien Flops!".

  The show was in genuine danger of being cancelled. At a low point in 1994, NBC threatened to put O'Brien on a week-to-week contract. Executives were anxious to hand the slot to Greg Kinnear, who hosted Later at 1:30 am. Interns filled empty seats in the audience while affiliates began asking about replacement hosts. Sidekick Andy Richter captured the precariousness of that period by joking, after a stretch of reruns, that he had spent the break "reminding myself what it's like to be unemployed."

  A turning point arrived with David Letterman's February 1994 appearance on the show. "It was a morale boost," O'Brien said. "I'm thinking, if the guy who created the 12:30 thing comes on and says we're smart and funny, let's go." Early in 1995, head writer Robert Smigel quit, citing burnout, and the show absorbed that wobble too. A comedic identity slowly emerged: a blend of the lewd and the surreal with more carefully crafted, narrative-driven remote segments. One remote involving a Civil War-era baseball league became one of O'Brien's personal favorites, prompting him to later remark, "When I leave this earth, at the funeral, just show this."

  The audience, largely young and male, grew steadily, and the show began consistently outperforming its competitors, holding that position for fifteen seasons. Beginning in 1996, the Late Night writing team was nominated annually for the Emmy Award for Best Writing in a Comedy or Variety Series, finally winning in 2007. The Writers Guild Award for Best Writing in a Comedy or Variety Series went to O'Brien and his team in 1997, 2000, 2002, 2003, and 2004. By the show's later years, Late Night was consistently attracting an audience of around 2.5 million viewers per episode. Even Tom Shales became a convert, calling the show's turnaround "one of the most amazing transformations in television history."

  In 2001, O'Brien formed his own television production company, Conaco. That same year, he returned to Saturday Night Live as a host during its 26th season. In 2006, he noticed his physical resemblance to Tarja Halonen, then running for re-election as president of Finland, and Late Night began airing mock political advertisements both for her and against her main opponent, Sauli Niinistö. O'Brien then traveled to Helsinki for five days to film a one-hour special, during which he met Halonen at the Finnish Presidential Palace. Halonen won the election.

• 5. The Tonight Show and the Exit

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  As part of a contract negotiated with NBC in 2004, the network agreed that O'Brien would take over The Tonight Show from Jay Leno in 2009. Hosting that program had been a lifelong dream for O'Brien, and that promise kept him at NBC even when he likely could have negotiated more money elsewhere.

  The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien debuted on the 1st of June 2009, with Will Ferrell as the first guest on the couch and Pearl Jam as the first musical act. O'Brien acquired the nickname "Coco" during a Twitter-themed sketch in the second episode, and when guest Tom Hanks used the name in conversation and got the audience to chant it, O'Brien told Hanks in mock seriousness, "If that catches on, I'll sue you." In September 2009, O'Brien suffered a mild concussion after slipping and hitting his head during a comedy sketch with guest Teri Hatcher. He was examined at a hospital and returned to work the following Monday.

  By November 2009, the ratings for O'Brien's Tonight Show had dropped by around 2 million viewers compared to when Leno had hosted. On the 7th of January 2010, NBC executive Jeff Zucker met with both Leno and O'Brien to propose moving Leno into an 11:35 pm slot, which would push The Tonight Show to 12:05 am. O'Brien's response was made public on January 12. "The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn't The Tonight Show," he wrote in a formal statement.

  On the 21st of January 2010, it was announced that O'Brien had reached a deal with NBC to exit the show the following day. The settlement totaled $45 million, of which $12 million was set aside for his staff members, who had relocated from New York to Los Angeles when O'Brien moved to host the show. The final episode aired the 22nd of January 2010, featuring Tom Hanks, Steve Carell, Neil Young, and Will Ferrell, who sang "Free Bird" while O'Brien played guitar alongside Beck, Ben Harper, ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons, and Ferrell's wife Viveca Paulin.

• 6. The Tour, TBS, and What Came After

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  Under the terms of his NBC settlement, O'Brien was barred from television appearances until May 2010. On the 2nd of May 2010, he broke that silence with an interview on 60 Minutes with Steve Kroft. He described the Tonight Show situation as feeling "like a marriage breaking up suddenly, violently, quickly." But he also insisted he had no regrets. "It's crucial to me that anyone seeing this, if they take anything away from this, it's I'm fine. I'm doing great," he said.

  On the 11th of March 2010, O'Brien announced via Twitter a thirty-city live comedy tour called "The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour". It opened on the 12th of April 2010, in Eugene, Oregon, before a crowd of 2,500 with no television cameras. The tour moved through the Northwest and Canada before landing at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, near his former Late Night studios. It ended in Atlanta on June 14. That same day the tour began, O'Brien announced he would host a new show on TBS. A 2011 documentary film, Conan O'Brien Can't Stop, directed by O'Brien's personal friend and Harvard classmate Rodman Flender, followed O'Brien throughout the tour and premiered at South by Southwest.

  Conan debuted on TBS on the 8th of November 2010, and ran Monday through Thursday. Over the following years, O'Brien developed the international travel series Conan Without Borders. In February 2015, following the onset of the Cuban thaw, O'Brien became the first American television personality to film in Cuba in more than half a century. In April 2016, a fan letter prompted a trip to South Korea, during which O'Brien and actor Steven Yeun technically stepped into North Korea by crossing a border marker at the Demilitarized Zone. The Conan Without Borders series eventually covered thirteen countries in total and won an Emmy in 2018. The final episode of Conan aired on the 24th of June 2021, after a run of 1,510 episodes, closing out what O'Brien described as a nearly twenty-eight year career as a late-night host.

• 7. Podcasts, Travel, and Recognition

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  In 2018, O'Brien's production company Team Coco partnered with Earwolf to launch the weekly podcast Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend. It debuted on the 18th of November 2018, with Will Ferrell as the first guest. Each episode pairs O'Brien with a celebrity guest alongside his former assistant Sona Movsesian and producer Matt Gourley. Guests have included Barack and Michelle Obama, Stephen Colbert, and Bob Newhart. As of August 2021, the podcast had been downloaded more than 250 million times and was averaging more than 9 million downloads per month. In May 2022, Team Coco's entire digital media business, including the podcast, was sold to SiriusXM for $150 million.

  On the 18th of April 2024, HBO released the four-episode travel series Conan O'Brien Must Go, following O'Brien to Norway, Argentina, Thailand, and Ireland to meet fans he had previously featured via video calls in his podcast. The show was renewed for a second season of six episodes in May 2024.

  In January 2025, O'Brien was named the 2025 recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. He received the award on March 23 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. On the 2nd of March 2025, O'Brien hosted the 97th Academy Awards for the first time. The ceremony achieved its best U.S. television ratings in five years. Two weeks later, the Academy announced he would return for the 98th Academy Awards, and O'Brien is set to host the 99th ceremony in 2027 as well. He was also inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 2025. In May 2026, Harvard University awarded O'Brien an honorary Doctor of Arts degree at its annual commencement ceremony, where he also delivered the commencement speech.